In Memoriam: Andrew Zimmern Remembers Anthony Bourdain

Anthony Bourdain with Andrew Zimmern

Anthony Bourdain and Andrew Zimmern at the 2011 South Beach Wine & Food Festival in Miami.

Anthony Bourdain was a man of contradictions. His work from almost two decades ago inspired a rogue-ish bro culture in the chef world that he had come to revile and worked hard to repudiate in the last few years. Almost 13 years ago he told me television was the “most vile mistress,” yet he refined the medium to suit his needs as a communicator and was addicted to its power as a tool to communicate.

He sought to highlight, to underscore the most simple essence of a place and its people, insisting that we never ignore the obvious. Yet he did this by profiling so many people and places from the fringe. He made the invisible, visible and understandable.

He raised up the humblest aspects of our community—from the prep cook to the rural farmer on the far side of the planet—and also hung out with the cultural royalty of our generation. He was in many ways a rebel, an anarchist, but he revered the classics. He made commercial television but took inspiration from the great cinematic auteurs he so feverishly admired. He championed the Davids of the world—calling out the Goliaths—and then became a symphonic behemoth of incredible gravitational pull. Who didn’t want to be with Tony when he walked into a room? He was the most charismatic man I knew.

Tony came to Minnesota several times, most prominently to shoot a portion of his Midwest No Reservations show and to appear at the State Theatre for his touring stage show. A few months before coming to Minneapolis he called me late one evening. “Help me out,” he said, “I need to know the one restaurant you think I would like where the chef isn’t a total douchebag.”

Without hesitation I told him to have his producer call Doug Flicker at Piccolo. I thought they were superb together. Tony told me years later he thought Doug was certainly douche-less, which I found to be pretty funny at the time.

His appearance several years ago at the State Theatre continues to be something I’m asked about, especially here at home in these days following his death. He had booked about 20 shows that year and called to see if I would join him on stage. I asked why; he certainly had plenty to say on his own and most often appeared solo. “I want my friends on stage with me,” he said, “so I don’t have to work so hard. Eric [Ripert, chef at Le Bernardin,] is doing it with me in New York, and I want us to do this in Minneapolis.” Of course I said yes, and I remember almost all of that special day.

Tony came in early, and we spent about four hours in the green room catching up, eating tacos and burgers which we had delivered. The show was hysterical, and the audience saw the best of Bourdain that night. After the book signing on stage—something he told me he generally loathed but that “everyone here is so nice”—we ate dinner at 112 Eatery with my wife and his stage manager, and ordered just about everything off the menu. He loved that place.

Afterwards, I walked him to his hotel before driving home. “This is a strange place,” he said to me, “but maybe I don’t get it. And it’s so cold in the winter. But I can see you’re so happy here, and that’s all that matters really.” That’s true, and somehow that sentence really sticks out for me since his passing. Happiness. Such a sad word sometimes when you’re looking in the rearview mirror.

I recall him talking to me at various times about chucking it all in and “living a feral life on a beach in Vietnam.” Then there was the night when he talked for an hour over dinner about the joy he felt he could squeeze from teaching writing or literature. That conversation was followed by a call months later when he rightly asserted that “guys like us will never stop doing what we really love”—the road, the discovery, the camaraderie, the making of the messaging, the eagerness to see how others would interpret the work when it aired.

His biographical footnotes have been well documented over the last few days. His impact on our culture was immeasurable. Our food world looked different once Anthony Bourdain exploded into our consciousness.

I’m alone in my kitchen writing this while making a hunter’s stew of braised chicken. Anthony Bourdain died 48 hours ago. I need the yoga of cooking to take me away from the greatest contradiction of all, the only one I can’t reconcile. As human beings, we need personal transparency to be understood, and in doing so can inspire empathy and demonstrate it. It’s only through that emotional mechanism that we can be happy and content. Someone, not everyone in our lives, needs to truly know us. I thought my friend had that in his life, and his suicide tells me I was wrong. His pain, long-standing it appears, is heartbreaking.

The dissonance of your outsides not matching your insides, the enigmatic nature of celebrity, the loneliness of the road, the applause wherever you go ringing in your ears while the tape plays in your head over and over, repeating the negative self-talk that you aren’t what people think you are . . . that’s what is keeping me up at night and weighing heavily on my soul. It didn’t have to end this way. But it did.

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